Part Two: Charles Koch: The Luke Skywalker of Rich People

Robert is joined again by comedian Ever Mainard and they continue to discuss Charles Koch, the notorious face behind the Koch Brothers empire.

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Mmm, Hello, dear friends, I remembered Evans And this is
Behind the Bastards to show where we tell you everything
you don't know about the very worst people in all
of history. Now, this is part two of our epic
two part episode on Charles Coke. Uh and with me

(00:21):
as within. The first episode is Ever Maynard Hello, Star
of the Fields on Netflix Kickboxing Expert. Yeah you can
say that, m M a commentor yeah, yeah, definitely, big
YouTube commenter. I love yeah, read it, yelped any any
platform where I can make a comment. I'm going to comment.

(00:41):
You know what I love about the Internet is lets you,
lets you anonymously threatened people. Oh it's never anonymous? Yes,
fight me. So last episode, how would you sum up
what we learned about Charles Coke? Last episode? No joke.
My tummy started rumbling and I thought I was going

(01:03):
to have to run out to the bathroom because I
was filled with a lot of sorrow. And then how
many lives were destroyed even through like cancer and that
like lineage of of that one story, like you know,
like his family's fucked, but then you know at one point,
like what a blessing is a job? He has stability,
but then that thing ended up being the snake that

(01:23):
bit him. Yeah, yeah, you know, and that's I mean,
we don't even know about in a way, that's him,
but being like, hey, like what it what was it?
Like you can pay to be a slave or get Yeah,
the Freedom School, which Charles Coke funded early on in
his life. In a way, it's sort of like that
without them realizing it. Yeah, that's what's going on. Yeah,

(01:44):
if you won't sell yourself into slavery, I will show
you as little human concern as I would show for
a slave, and then just trust that most of you
won't realize how badly you got sucked over and sue me. Yeah,
because like Daniel Carlson, that guy sued. But I'm gonna
guess there's a lot of people who didn't sue, who
got sucked over and just didn't connect the dots well enough,

(02:04):
you know, got Leukemian assumed it was their cigarette smoking
rather than being bathed in benzene all day long. Anyway,
let's yeah, I want to open this up by repeating
a quote Charles Coke wrote in that nineteen seventy eight
Libertarian Reader article where he sort of argued that business
owners should fight against government regulation at all costs. Do

(02:27):
not cooperate voluntarily. Instead, resist wherever and to whatever extent
you legally can, and do so in the name of justice.
So let's start today by talking about some more of
the ship Charles Coke and his company did in the
name of justice. I'm going to quote from the book
Dark Money here. Carnell Green was a pipeline technician and
gas meter serviceman for Coke Industries. When he ran a

(02:47):
foul of the management. He had to work for the
company from nineteen seventy six until nineteen ninety six, during
which time he said he was told to sweep mercury
spills from the thirty six guests meters he monitored out
on the door and onto the ground. He said that
he was also told to dispose of the old meters,
which contained about a quart of mercury each, in dumpsters,
and to pour additional containers of mercury down the sink.

(03:08):
As he witnessed his supervisor doing. You're lying, Green said
the mercury was so pervasive. When he got home, balls
of it would roll off of his clothes and out
of his shoes. That's not right, that's not good. That's
supposed to pour mercury down the sink, get in the

(03:29):
water tables bad. Wow. Yeah, I don't think Charles Coke
drinks a lot of tap water. So when Green made
a fuss about the rampant mercury exposure, he was approached
by FBI Special Agent Mormon, who told him that he
was lying about this and he'd better shut up if
he knew it was good for him. Green supervisor gave
him a statement to sign to confirm that he hadn't

(03:51):
seen any mercury and coke buildings, so he got the
FBI invall. Okay, when FBI at all, My gosh, there's
an episode in Riverdale where okay, where this guy's like,
I'm an FBI agent or she's like I don't know
what to do, and he's like, honey, to be a mall.

(04:12):
And then it turned out, oh, ding dong, it was
that dude's dad guy pretending to be an FBI agent.
Now I see where the writers got it. It happens
as shipload in the Coke story. This is the only
time we're bringing it up in here, but in Dark
Money and in other reports, there's a ton of times
where Coke secure like by the way, were and then
they bullied them. Wow, okay, didn't interrupt but continue. No, no,

(04:34):
it's fine. So Green, the guy who was not comfortable
with all of the mercury poisoning he was seeing, filed
to complaint with OSHA anyway and was fired from making
false statements. It later turned out that Special Agent Mormon
was a Coke security employee and not an FBI agent
as you guessed. That's got to feel really good for
that all all parties involved, that fake FBI agent the manager. Wow,

(04:58):
it's fun. Um. So there is a long history, as
you might have guessed, of regulatory fer you by Coke Industries.
Thanks to a tangled web of India's hush payments and
law nonsense. It's often hard to pin down the exact nonsense.
It's a good name for a TV show. Yeah, it's
hard for us though, to get like exact numbers. This
is how many people were hospitalized or made sick or whatever. Um.

(05:18):
But there are some crystal clear examples we get of
times Charles Coke's corporate philosophy got people killed. A man
in Kemp, Texas he noticed an odd gassy smell all
around his neighborhood we're both Texans listeners to these. She
didn't cast this from the first one. Yeah, I get it.
Cooke brothers really fucked around the lot in Texas. Yeah. So,

(05:40):
a man in Kemp noticed an odd gassy smell around
his neighborhood. He sent his daughter, Danielle Smalley and her
friend Jason stone Uh to go report it. The two
seventeen year olds got into their car and turned it on,
and a spark from the ignition lit the gas and
caused a gigantic explosion that killed them both instantly. Here
is a quote from South Coast Today, a newspaper reporting

(06:01):
on it at the time. Quote flames reaching dozens of
feet high and a column of black smoke could be
seen from miles and firefighters from six communities were called in.
While I was sitting there at ignited, said resident Rick Burgett.
The flames came almost up to the front door of
my house. It was probably about a hundred and fifty
degrees on my porch. The culprit was found to be
an eight inch wide gas pipeline stretching from the Medford

(06:23):
stretching from Medford, Oklahoma to Mount Bellevue, Texas, and operated
by Coke Industries. Calls to company headquarters in Wichita, Kansas,
Saturday night were not answered, so when the FED started
examining the pipeline, they found severe corrosion and mechanical damage
so extensive it was described as quote Swiss cheese. Coke
Industries had actually stopped using the pipeline in N two,

(06:45):
but in ninetive they realized they could start making a
few million dollars extra a year if they got it
back into service, so they did the minimum amount of
necessary repair work. I'm going to quote now from a
Rolling Stone article inside the Coke Brothers Toxic Empire. When
Coke decided to started up again in n a water
pressure test had blown the pipe open. An inspection of
just a few dozen miles of pipe near the Smalley

(07:06):
home found five hundred and thirty eight corrosion defects. The
industry's term of art for a pipeline in this condition
is Swiss cheese. According to the testimony, even expert witness,
essentially the pipeline is gone. This is what a witness
says at time, like the pipeline almost doesn't exist, it's
so full of holes. So Coke Industries repaired eighty of
the five hundred and thirty eight defects just yet, just

(07:27):
enough that it could pass the pressure test again, and
then they started flowing highly explosive ship through it. Now,
one month after they started running fluid again, Coke employees
found that one of the anti corrosion systems they'd installed
had malfunctioned. They just didn't fix it. The pipeline repair
efforts had occurred during a time when Charles Coke had
told his managers he wanted costs cut so that they
could increase profits by five and fifty million per year.

(07:49):
That April, he'd sent out a message that demanded expense
cuts of ten quote through the elimination of waste. I'm
sure they're is much more than that. Of course, the
getting this pipeline back an option and not putting in
proper like, not properly repairing it was part of this
cost cutting thing, and it led to two deaths in
a huge amount of property damage. I think it led

(08:09):
to a lot more than two deaths. Yeah, it led
to two deaths that are very easy to trace to. Yeah. Yeah,
I mean who knows from the poisoning wid Yeah, exactly,
because gas is leaking out everywhere. It can't be good
for people there the water to soil and crops grown
exactly what Yeah, uh, there was a trial, of course,
and it did not go well for Coke Industries. Here's

(08:31):
the rolling stone again. A former Coke manager Kenneth Whitstein
with Stein with Stein. Yeah, a look at how this name.
Look at how this name is spelled. Everything is spelled wrong.
Cannot a former coach manager kin Off white steinet Off

(08:52):
get over here? A former Coke manager Kenneth white Stein
testified to indictments or to incidents in which Coke Industries
placed profits over public safety. As one supervisor had told him,
regulatory finds quote usually didn't amount to much, and besides,
the company had quote a stable full of lawyers in
Wichita that handled those situations. When whitt Stein told another

(09:12):
manager he was concerned that unsafe pipelines could cause a
deadly accident, this manager said that it was more profitable
for the company to risk litigation than to repair faulty equipment.
A lot like life insurance or car insurance insurance companies
in general. Weird that all of these people are terrible.
In the same way, the company could quote pay off
a lawsuit from an incident and still be money ahead,

(09:35):
he said, describing the principles of market based management to
a t. Yeah. So uh, kinn Off, No, Kinnoth is
the guy who tried to report some of the unsafe
stuff it did. Yeah, we should, but just kin Off
k E N O T H. It's Kenneth. We all
know the name. No, it's I'm judgmental and angry. Talk

(09:57):
about a witch alignment. So yeah, Rolling Stone draws a
direct connection between these deaths and what was done with
that pipeline and market based management um because undermarket based management,
again the whole company, all these business units are competing.
But it also sort of encourages people to look at fines.
You know, a fine is supposed to be it's supposed
to be a punishment for doing something wrong, for causing damage.

(10:21):
But in coke companies, it wasn't. They weren't seen that
they would. They were seen as essentially a cheaper alternative
to the repairs. The fines cost this much. The repairs
cost this much. Oh, it's much more sound to pay
for the pay for the fines if we incur them.
So Coke Industries was ordered to pay two nine six
million dollars to Danielle's father. At that point in time,

(10:42):
it was the largest wrongful death suit in US legal history.
They settled out of court for an undisclosed amount, but
it was probably a significant amount of money, and this
judgment actually hurt. It wasn't the only one either. As
Coke Industries got in increasing hot water over the nineteen nineties,
they paid out more and more in legal fees and
in fines. Charles Coke was even forced to acknowledge this
sort of in his two thousand and seven self help

(11:03):
book The Science of Success. Excuse me, it was more
of like a business book, but one of those books
people who want to start businesses read. Have you guys
while we're talking about him, Uh, there's a documentary on Netflix.
It's about this wine guy that fooled everybody. Have you
heard about this? It's like a fake wine dude. And

(11:25):
I think they Yeah, but he's like selling people all
these like wines or like you know, see that. I
support I think that he They interview one of the
coach brothers. Brothers. I hope, I hope you can tricked him.
I hope he tricked hope. They're always getting swindled Okay. Anyways,
he wrote a self help book. Yeah, he wrote a
self well he wrote yeah, he wrote this book, The

(11:45):
Science of Success, where he sort of acknowledged all of
the Yeah, this is what he wrote. At the time,
while business was booming, it was becoming increasingly regulated, we
kept thinking and acting as if we lived in a
pure market economy. The reality was far different. So this
is what he also down to is, oh, we just
were acting like it was a pure market economy. And
in a pure market economy, you can flow explosive gas

(12:06):
through a pipeline that's not even functioning as a pipeline
and runs directly under the homes of human beings because
that's fine. The market says it's fine. So whatever you're
doing is okay, it's all about it's all about the market.
The markets. His fucking that's his child, that's his child,
that's the force to Charles Coke, and he's again Luke
Skywalker of rich people. I don't know, maybe I shouldn't

(12:28):
keep trying to draw it back to Star Wars, but yeah,
that's what I'm doing, and you can't knowing to stop me.
It's already been a theme running through the show. So
the increasing regulatory costs and whatnot had a number of
effects on Charles Coke and his businesses. One of these
effects seems to be that his company started to obey
more regulations and commit fewer blatant environmental crimes in the

(12:48):
late nineties and early two thousand's. Charles viewed this as
a temporary setback. The laws were just a reflection of
the culture, and he had a plan to change both.
In n Charles Coke helped to launch viatins of thousands
of dollars in funding the Center for Libertarian Studies in
New York City. Now libertarianism wasn't as wasn't much of
a force in society at this point. Charles wanted to

(13:09):
change that, and he knew he had to start by
incubating a new generation or nineteen seventy six did I
say I'm gonna read this again? Sorry? In nineteen seventy six,
Charles Coke had helped to launch, via tens of thousands
of dollars, the Center for Libertarian Studies in New York City.
Now libertarianism wasn't much of a force in society at
this point, and Charles wanted to change that. He knew
he had to start by incubating a new generation of

(13:31):
political pundits who could help sell his ideology to the
nation at large. There's a quote from Charles, the development
of talent is or should be, the major point of
all these efforts. By talent, I mean those rare, exceptionally
capable scholars or communicators willing to dedicate their lives to
the cause of individual liberty. Charles's actual political goals were
terrifying the most Americans, even most conservatives. He supported an

(13:53):
into social security, to all forms of public welfare, to
most of the military. One libertarian writer who interviewed him
said his goal was to destroy government quote at the route.
Now there are a number of theories as to why
this was Charles's mission in life. Clayton Coppin, that researcher
who worked for Bill and Charles Coke and wrote a
book about him, basically thinks the latter's hatred of the

(14:13):
government came out of the harsh discipline of his childhood. Quote.
Only the governments and the courts remained as sources of authority,
so Coke had to destroy them too. That's this guy's theory,
and it seems credible. By nineteen eighty Charles Coke decided
he had just about enough of sitting in the shadows,
funding libertarian think tanks and ignoring life saving regulations. It
was time to get political, or rather, it was time
for his brother David to get political, because Charles was

(14:35):
really really into being the whole guy pulling strings from
the shadows. So, since the Cooke brothers were by this
point billionaires and then sort of their own right, they
decided that jumping into state level politics or even running
for Congress was two small means for them. Since they
were already supporting Libertarian Party presidential candidate Ed Clark in
the nineteen eighty election, they decided to just make David
his running mate. This allowed them to conveniently ignore all

(14:57):
limits on pain contributions. Since David was he could spend
all the money he wanted, which he did, providing six
of Libertarian parties election budget that year. During the election,
Clark told The Nation that magazine The Nation that Libertarians
planned quote a very big tea party because America was
quote sick to death of taxes. The Clark Coke campaign
advocated for, among other things, the repeal of the minimum wage,

(15:20):
the repeal of all child labor laws, the end of
all forms of public assistance, and the destruction of the
f d A. Yeah. Yeah, that that that famous enemy
of liberty. The You know what I hate is when
people tell me I can't sell expired food to kids.
Really pisses me, really gets going. They have the freedom
to eat expired food, they should have them. They should

(15:42):
make that decision themselves. Yeah, exactly, you get it. Yeah,
I understand, Yeah, he understand freedom. Freedom is lying about
the age of Shockingly, most Americans did not get on
board with the coke platform of let children work and
sell people poison. The Libertarian Party was probably received less

(16:05):
of the vote that year than perennial right and candidate
Batman told you Batman. Yeah. It was a heavy blow
to Charles, but being a heroic soul, he was not
about to let the bastards grind him down. He refined
his strategies in he finally got it right. During that
election cycle, he and his brother found a way to
funnel millions of dollars, probably more than they'd ever spent
on an election, towards a variety of right wing candidates.

(16:28):
We know that through their company they spent three hundred
and eight hundred dollars on congressional candidates that year, but
the Senate campaign finance investigators suspect they spent millions and
just funneled it through a variety of dark money groups.
One of these groups was a company called Triad Management.
Triad spent a huge amount of money running vicious attack
ads and several very close races. One of these was

(16:48):
the race between Sam brown Back, a Republican, and Jill Docking,
a Democrat, in Kansas. Shortly before the election, thousands of
voters received this phone call quote, we think it's important
for people to know that Jill talking is Jewish. Please
vote for Sam brown Back. That's the whole message. It's

(17:09):
important to note Jewish. She didn't make a point of
this in her campaign, so we'll let you know. Yeah.
Now this had a major impact on the election, which
we'll get to in a minute, but it was noticed
at the time. The blowback from all of this dark
money and you know, rampant anti Semitism led to a

(17:30):
Senate investigation on illegal fundraising. America being America. The Republicans
in the Senate focused on investigating whether Clinton whether the
Clinton re election campaign had illegally accepted money from China. Well,
the Democrats focused on determining whether or not the Koke
brothers and their fellow rich people had violated campaign finance
law in order to support the Republican Party. To be
perfectly fair, there absolutely seems to have been some shadiness

(17:50):
between the Clintons, or at least their campaign and Chinese donors. Uh.
The Early Times actually broke that story. We're not going
to go into detail here, but I don't want anyone
to think that the Democrats are blameless in the dark
money game. Uh. That said, the Senate investigation into the
nineteen nine elections seems to have gotten so consumed with
what about ism that very little was actually done to
stop the problems that had led to both scandals. The

(18:11):
Democratic Minority report in the investigation stated, quote the facts
suggests that these individuals spent millions of dollars to effect
over two dozen federal elections despite operating completely outside of
federal election laws. Now we know that Triad spent three
million dollars on twenty six House and Senate races in
nineteen and we know that the Economic Education Trust, funded

(18:32):
by the Koch brothers paid for more than half of this.
Democratic investigators found that most of the purchase ads were
like that famous brown back jew ad, focused towards assaulting
specific candidates rather than promoting anything. Most of the candidates
targeted were in districts where the Koch brothers had large
business interests. The money that was put into Triad was
then poured out via two different nonprofits, Citizens for Reform

(18:53):
and Citizens for the Republic, neither of which had any
offices or desks, and both of which seemed to exist
as just away for Triad to further obvious skate the operations. Now,
like I said, the other half of this investigation was
into improprieties between China and the Clinton campaign. Republicans called
for three subpoenas to investigate this, and they got three
hundred and fifteen. Democrats meanwhile, called for two hundred subpoenas
to investigate all this coke shading nous and received eighty nine.

(19:16):
Excuse me, yeah, it doesn't seem fair, right, it seems
a little messed up. Whatever. The subpoenas that were issued revealed,
among other things, one million in spending on four congressional
races in Kansas, including four D twenty thousand on television
ads in the race between Sam brown Back and Jill Docking. Yeah,
and Jill Docking who. I don't know if you caught on.
This was important, very important. Uh. In two thousand to,

(19:39):
the Federal Election Commission sued the owner of Triad Management
for failing to register as a political organization. The owner,
a lady named Malanik, was forced to pay a fine
and submit donor receipts to the FEC. She refused to
do this, She said, quote, the bottom line is you
can't buy your honor or integrity back. My word was
my bond. She followed for Chapter seven bankruptcy and two
thousand six, but still stands by her work in the

(20:01):
nineteen nineties. She's claimed that Tread's business model was ahead
of its time, which is hard to argue with. Holy
sh it, it's crazy how these guys really are the
pioneers and how much history they are. The Christopher Columbuses
of campaign finance slaughtering. Yeah, in a couple of ways.
In every way, you could be the Columbus. Yeah. Disgusting, terrible,

(20:23):
you know it's not disgusting into products and services that
support this podcast? Agree with you? Where are those products? Oh?
Just you wait and see, and we're back. We just
got finished talking about the nine elections in which the

(20:43):
Koch brothers pioneered what we would now just describe as
the way that election ads are funded. Uh, they sort
of invented that in the nineteen nineties. Yeah, funneling dark
money around through a bunch of different groups that when
you say dark money, it sounds almost exotic. So we
got a tiny change that dark Yeah, it's like dark chocolate.

(21:03):
It's money. I'm involved with some shady things, but don't worry,
it's just dark money. I would love to go out,
like with a friend to a restaurant and then tip
the waitress or waiter in dark money and be like,
you know what, because this was so good, I'm not
going to pay you in regular money. Here's some dark money,
than you spend that on something dark. I feel sad. Yeah,

(21:29):
I feel very sad. I felt when I came into
this podcast. I felt great. I really did. I like
meditated for two hours today and then now I'm just like, like,
I'm gonna go home and cry. Probably almost cried a
minute ago. Well, that's our goal with Behind the Bastards,
you know. I hope that when people listen to the

(21:50):
show in their morning commute or during their workout, they're
just a little bit more furious the rest of the day.
Perfect workout juice. Even what else is great? Workout juice, Celsius,
I thought you were going to do it. I'll do
a Dorito's at They're also great for workouts because they're
high end protein compared to nothing. Some amount of protein delightful.

(22:16):
I'm always down for some amount of protein. That's the
right amount. All right, let's get back into the tail
um now. The money that the Cokes through directly at
elections during the late nineties and early two thousand's was
more of a stop gap than anything. From what I
can tell, it was targeted at races that would directly
impact coke industries business. So most of what they're spending

(22:39):
in this period, like the late nineties is towards races
where there was would be a direct impact based on
who one on their on their their business interests um
kind of what's going on right now and always it's
always going, always going on. Charles Coke does a step
about it because he's not just for a lot of companies.
I think funding races that are going to you know,
wear a certain per and winds that benefits the company.

(23:01):
That's kind of the end of their thinking. Coke is
playing a very long game here. He's not just trying
to he's trying to change American culture. I bet he's
really hard right now. Seeing what's going on, you might
be surprised, uh so um in. From the late nineteen
seventies into the early two thousand's, the Coke brothers, namely Charles,

(23:22):
seated a shipload of institutions and think tanks with their money.
This was Charles Coke's long con. In nineteen seventy eight,
he had written that quote, ideas do not spread by themselves.
They spread only through people, which means we need a movement.
Only with the movement can we build an effective force
for social change. So for decades he's he'd embarked on
a strategy of funding academics and pundits, people like Lafev

(23:42):
and his Freedom School, but also more mainstream libertarian groups
like the Heritage Foundation or the Cato Institute in the
diet No. His goal with all this was to achieve
something deeper than the short term anger a racy campaign
ad kit spark. Charles believed that by provoting enough voices
who would repeat his ideas throughout the culture. He could
change that culture. Now, according to Charles, young people were

(24:04):
quote the only group that is open to a radically
different social philosophy. So they were the group he focused
most of his resources on. In order to accomplish this,
he and his fellow travelers looked too. When you say travelers,
I think of like a merry band. No, are you
going to guess who they look to for advice on
recruiting children? Oh tell me it's the Nazis. The Nazis

(24:30):
I quote from Dark Money here in support of building
their own youth movement. Another speaker, the libertarian historian Leonard Lego,
cited the success of the Nazi model in his paper
titled National Socialist Political Strategy Social Change in a modern
industrial society with an authoritarian tradition. Likio, who was affiliated
with a Coke funded Institute for Humane Studies from nineteen
seventy four until, described the Nazi successful creation of a

(24:53):
youth movement as key to their capture of the state.
Like the Nazis, he suggested libertarians should organize university students
to create group identity. Now, some people might say that
if you ever find yourself saying like the Nazis, we
should do X. You're on the wrong side. That's that's
my thinking. Don't don't do what the Nazis did. Ever, Yeah,

(25:19):
this is not how Charles Cooke felt. He was like, efficiency,
the Nazis, that's where our money comes from. It's important
to note she's Jewish. Yeah, when you really tie together
all of the little strands, it doesn't Yeah, he looks, yeah, yeah, anyway.
Uh so. George Pearson, a former John Birch Society member

(25:40):
who later worked for Charles, was the first person to
suggest to him directly that a great way to recruit
the young would be to found scholarly institutes inside universities. Now,
the Coke said, for a while been giving money to universities.
But when you give a money, when you give money
to a school that can spend it on anything, including
on paying researchers and academics who might believe in things
you don't agree with, might do research that counteracts your

(26:02):
own opinions. You don't want that. Now, if you find
a found a scholarly institute within a college, however, you
have control over how that money is spent um, so
you can directly control new generations of thinkers and directly
influence the pliant minds of their students. This brings us
to the Mercadis Center, which The Chronicle of Higher Education
describes as a quote libertarian style think tank within George

(26:25):
Mason University. From two thousand eleven to two thousand fourteen alone,
the Charles Coke Foundation put fifty million dollars into the
Mercadis Center. Now Mercadis was founded by Richard Fink, a
professor at the college who had all also been an
executive vice president member of the board of directors for
Coke Industries. Here's the Chronicle. Mr williams politics are no secret.

(26:46):
On his bookshelves rest a bust of Adam Smith, the
patron saint of unimpeded Capitalism, and a copy of The
Libertarian Reader. But Mr Williams says that he is careful
not to bring his opinions, hardened as they are, into
the classroom. He's scoffed in and a suggestion that George
Mason's Economy next department indoctrinate students with anti regulatory free
market messages. He does, however, hope his pupils will come

(27:06):
to see the world just as he does. I would
like my students to share my subjective opinions. Mr Williams said,
if they become hard minded thinkers, they will adopt many
of my opinions. Now. George Masson is a public university
in Virginia, and not everyone who works there was a
sanguine about the impact the Marcadis Center had on the
freedom of dialogue within the university. Here's Carry Meyer, an
associate economics professor who describes herself as somewhat left of center. Quote.

(27:30):
Looking back on her career, miss Meyer said she had
held back in her scholarship at George Mason, gravitating towards
vanilla topics, such as a book based on the diaries
of her family's farm. She did not want to rock
the boat quote. I carefully chose my research so it
wouldn't be objectionable to them, she said. Mr miss Meyer,
described by her colleagues as miss Meyer described her colleagues

(27:51):
as smart economists, but said they collectively provide graduate students
with a narrow view of the discipline. I would tell
people that it's better to go to a place where
they would get a broader education. Agency, she said. See
the Marcadis Center was an independent body within the university,
so it's true that they had no formal power to
influence the kind of research people published, but many professors
at the school relied on the center for extra income.

(28:13):
Marcadis paid out over four thousand dollars a year to
two dozen faculty members, people who then had vested financial
interest in not publishing any research that might disagree with
Charles Coke's beliefs. Charles Coke himself said in an interview quote,
if we're going to give a lot of money, will
make darn sure they spend it in a way that
goes along with our intent. And if they make a
wrong turn and start doing things we don't agree with,

(28:34):
we withdraw funding. So this is how you change a
university using tenden millions of dollars in dark money. Yeah,
it's horrifying. Right. This is not the only school. He
does this too. This is just the clearest example. Yeah,
h hope your listeners at the gym or getting jacked
right now. Pump pump, real heart. Now, there are other

(28:56):
academic institutes that have received Coke money. It's hard to
say how many archers and professors and writers are in
the US have found themselves in a position of having
to avoid disagreeing with Charles Coke and their work. But
in two thousand and thirteen, the Center for Media and Democracy,
which Politico describes as a quote liberal group, published research
into the State Policy Network. Now, the State Policy Network
operates in all fifty states and claims to be quote

(29:18):
dedicated solely to improving the practical effectiveness of independent, nonprofit,
market oriented state focused think tanks. Sence, the Center for
Media and Democracy basically says that the State Policy Network
is a vehicle for pouring dark money into right wing
think takes around the country. Here's Politico. According to the
reports analysis of i r S filings, the State Policy

(29:39):
Network and its think tanks combined revenue in two thousand
eleven topped eighty three million dollars, in large part with
funding from conservative dark money groups like the Donor's Trust
and Donors Capital Fund, which received large donations from groups
tied to the Koch Brothers and other prominent conservatives. But yeah,
so there's a lot of different buckets they're putting money into,

(30:00):
and we will never know the extent of funding, but
it is in the hundreds of millions problems that they're
putting into just educational institutes. So with all this money
spent to change academia, Charles Cooke was essentially gambling that
he profit more by building a small but utterly dedicated
core of radical libertarian ideologists than he would by trying
to publicize his extreme beliefs to the masses. His thinking

(30:21):
here was entirely in line with what we know about
the way the human brain deals with extreme ideas. In
two thousand eleven, scientists at ren Sailor Polytechnic published a
bunch of research into how ideas in human society tip
from being the minority to the majority opinion. The scariest
thing they found, or the most optimistic, depending on your angle,
is that this happens very quickly once an idea reaches

(30:42):
a certain level of saturation. Here's Bolus losses Manski, a
distinguished professor at ren Sailor. When the number of committed
opinion holders is below ten percent, there is no visible
progress in the spread of ideas. It would literally take
the amount of time comparable to the age of the
universe for this size group to reach the majority. Once
that number grows above of ten percent, the idea spreads
like flame. Yeah, here's a quote from a physic org

(31:05):
right up on the research. In general, people do not
like to have an unpopular opinion and are always seeking
to try locally to come to a consensus. We set
up this dynamic in each of our models, uh says
one of the papers authors. To accomplish this, each of
the individuals and the models quote talked to each other
about their opinion. If the listener held the same opinions
as the speaker, it reinforced the listeners belief. If the
opinion was different, the listener considered it and moved on

(31:27):
to another person. If that person also held this new belief,
the listener then adopted that belief. So this was sort
of a a model that they set up in order
to sort of represent how ideas might spread throughout a culture.
And it's wise not to read too too much into
this because it's a study based on models of human
behavior rather than actual people, and the studies authors specifically
note that this model was not designed to replicate a

(31:48):
polarized society with a bunch of different radical ideas in it.
That said, if you spend a lot of time reading
about revolutions and protest movements. You can't can't deny that
this all sounds somewhat congruous with observable reality that there
is a point of saturation. Once you hit a certain
number of people pushing an extreme ideology, it can spread very,
very rapidly. Yeah. So that study came out in two

(32:10):
thousand eleven, a year in which revolution and unrestpread across
the Arab world like wildfire. The city's authors were admittedly
more concerned with explaining that than anything else. You know,
they were trying to ask, like, how can a guy
like Cadafi be in charge for forty years and almost overnight,
you know, there's this movement builds up, steamed to put
him out or whatever. Nothing. Do you think it was overnight?

(32:32):
I think if you listen to if you talk to
a lot of people who were involved in it, they
would say that they were angry for years, but that
they did not believe it was possible until somebody was Yeah, exactly.
There is a point at which the feeling that something
like that is possible tips um. And it seems like
that's sort of what Charles is trying to ink. Okay,

(32:53):
if you can get just enough people that are real
true believers and doesn't take a lot they can. You
can start seeing an idea that's pretty extreme spread like wildfire.
What is that? Is it bad religion? That song? True believers?
What is that? I don't know. I'm not good. Let's
up keeping it all in all right, hit me daddy

(33:21):
was the more facs. Alright, alright, alright, alright. So the
studies authors like I said, we're more interested in explaining yeah,
the herbs spring than anything else. But by that point,
in two thousand eleven, Charles Coke was two years into
fighting a revolution of his own to destroy a man
he viewed as a living death star, Rock Oboma. Despite

(33:42):
the regular Tory concerns, the nineteen nineties and early two
thousands has been a great time for the Koke brothers.
They diversified from fuel refining to every imaginable kind of
petro product. If it needed oil to produce, the Koke
Brothers were into that ship. They maintained ownership stake in
their company and put their profits right back into the business.
By two thousand six, Coke Industries made ninety billion per

(34:02):
year in profit, compared to seventy million in nineteen sixty.
Great businessmen, Great businessmen speak up their books. It sounds
like it's probably full of great stuff that you can
generalize to your whole life without becoming a terrible monster. Yeah.
Uh so the bush Ears were good for them, pick surprise,
although they were super anti Iraq war. Uh that is

(34:25):
one thing you can say for Charles Coke has been
consistently anti war, anti US intervention. Um. That is a
pretty consistent with libertarian ideology. You know, you shouldn't be
fucking around. It's too expensive. It's not like, oh he
didn't do it for like beings. He just thought it
was a waste of money, like a spark of hope. Okay, no, no,

(34:47):
just the money, but the lives mean nothing. Yeah, um
so the dead. Sorry, the bush Ears were good for them,
but they've gotten a lot of what they wanted regulation
wise during his eight years in power, which may have
had something to do with the two thousand eight crash.
But now we're digressing. Yeah, you may I pick up
on that digress I did here. Didn't he say that

(35:09):
there's going to be another crash coming up in like
two thousand one or twenty two. I mean, we're lucky
if it takes that long, right, Like somebody. I was
working a job this past weekend and like one of
the camera I only got to like touch on them
for part of it, but he was saying that. One
of the brothers was like, Yeah, there's gonna be a
crash coming up. Yeah, And it's like, oh, yeah, you're
gonna cause this crash for some well, they're not they're

(35:30):
not much into real estate speculator. That might honestly just
be them honestly looking at the market because a lot
of people are saying the housing market is due for
another big crash. Um Like, I don't want to be
fair to these guys because they're assholes. But that may
just be him looking at the writing just be like, hey,
he's coming. I'm going to say about my money. Look, dude,
I got like a couple under bucks. I'm trying to

(35:51):
get myself a down payment. You know that's more than
of Americans keeping saving. I think it's like the country
has less than a thousand dollars in savings. I believe it. Yeah,
it's gonna be great when the economy collapses and we
eat these people. You know what's crazy is when the
economy collapse, the first time I'll get back on subject
I see your little fingers. Um. I was just a barista,

(36:14):
so it didn't affect me at all. I was like,
why is everybody so stressed? I'm still making it a homeway. Yeah, yeah, boy. Yeah.
During the Bush years, yeah, they got a lot of
what they wanted regulation wise, but they didn't like the
Iraq war. Um. Throughout this period they also did support
to their credit sentence reduction for non violent drug offenders,

(36:35):
UM because they're not pro drug war guys. So again,
it's not all bad with the ship the Koke Brothers funds,
but it's a lot bad. Uh. In fact, David Coke,
who retired from political life recently, has shown gasps of
being a human being over the last few years. In
a two thousand three speech to alumniate his prep school
after he received a lifetime trustee status for a million

(36:56):
dollar donation, David said this, You might ask, how does
David happened to have the wealth to be so generous?
Will let me tell you a story. It all started
when I was a little boy. One day, my father
gave me an apple. I soon sold it for five
dollars and bought two apples and sold them for ten.
That I bought four apples and sold them for twenty Well,
this one on day after day, week after week, month
after month, year after year, until my father died and

(37:17):
left me three d million dollars. It's just a little bit,
but that's David Coke. Charles Coke has not joked about
inherited wealth because he doesn't think a state taxes should
be a thing anyway. The election of Barack Obama was
a big watershed moment for Charles Coke. Uh He claimed
that the two election would lead America to quote its

(37:37):
greatest loss of liberty and prosperity since the nineteen thirties,
which didn't didn't happen. I mean, maybe I missed it.
Maybe I missed us losing all of our wealth and prosperity,
But yeah, I didn't notice that. In his inaugural address,
President Obama said quote, without a watchful eye, the economy
can spin out of control, a clear reference to what
had just happened and as an eight financial christ crash.

(37:59):
This was receed to Charles Coke, the man who had
urged resistance at all costs in the face of regulation.
Never mind the fact that back in sept Timber of
two thousand eight, the Coke political organization, Americans for Prosperity,
had reversed their opinion on bailouts when the Dow dropped
seven seventy seven points in the stock market crash. Then
they'd supported seven hundred billion dollars worth of government intervention.
But now that Obama was in the White House and

(38:20):
talking about regulating Wall Street to avoid another crash, resistance
to tyrants was the only option that remained for Charles
uh Now. Since two thousand three, Charles had been assembling
a yearly meeting of major Republican donors, most of whom
were billionaires or multimillionaires who had inherited their fortunes. The
first Coke Group meeting after Obama's election is best described
as a war council Here's dark Money. Participants at the summits,

(38:43):
for instance, were routinely admonished to destroy all copies of
any paperwork, be mindful of the security and confidentiality of
your meeting notes and materials. The invitation to one gathering warned.
Guests were told to say nothing to the news media
and post nothing about the meetings online. Elaborate security steps
were taken to keep both the names of the participants
and the meetings agendas from public scrutiny. When signing up

(39:05):
to attend the conferences, participants were warned to make all
arrangements through the Coke staff rather than trusting the employees
at the resort, whose backgrounds were nonetheless investigated by the
Coke security detail. In an effort to detect intruders and impostors,
name tags were required at all functions, and smartphones, iPads, cameras,
and other recording gear were confiscated prior to sessions in
order to foil eavesdroppers. During one such gathering, audio technicians

(39:28):
planted white noise emitting loud speakers around the perimeters, aimed
outward towards any uninvited press in public. Yeah, they're treating
it like a rebellion, Like they're like they're like running
an underground revolutionary organization, which is what's happening. Um, it's
just that the people who were revolutionaries in this are
the richest people in the country. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, it's

(39:52):
super gross. We're gonna get into something not gross. Ads. Oh,
they're so good, they're so good. Boy. Howdy, let's hear
what they have to say about how you can support
this show. By spending money on other things. Okay, Uh,

(40:14):
so we've just gotten to the point where Charles Coke
goes into full on rebellion mode. Yeah yeah, yeah, he's
he's doing all the spy stuff. He's portraying himself to
at least other rich guys as like the leader of
this rebellion. Um. Now, there are two possibilities as I
see them here. Number one, he really is ideologically committed
to his course and all this secrecy in the extreme

(40:35):
language he uses is totally honest and based on his
heartfelt beliefs about the world. Or he just wants more
money in his pocket and he donates what he has
to donate because donation is better than paying taxes. His
principled stand that businessmen should resist all regulation is more
of an attempt to get other people to donate to
his cause, since he's clearly willing to compromise with the
government for his own interests. Um, you can come to

(40:57):
your own conclusion about whether or not Charles Coke's ideology
is just a scam essentially, or if he really believes
this he's in his eighties now, yeah, hard to say.
Or maybe he's changed over time. Um. Whatever the case,
After Obama's election, the Koke brothers, mainly Charles, poured astronomic
amounts of money into fighting the Obama administration. Eighteen other

(41:19):
billionaires joined them during the president's first term. Together, they
pulled money and resources to support politicians sympathetic to all
of their interests. In essence, they formed a trade union
for people who were born rich. They had held that
big secret meeting during the month Obama was sworn in,
and it had involved a debate between two Republican senators,
because when you're rich, you can just have senators debate
for you. Yeah, the train what is it another train

(41:41):
union or maybe yeah, senator bought the union. Anyways, I
have some family members that work their train conductors and
the it's not the train union. Maybe it is, but
they bought a senator who who changed all these rules.
And it's like, oh, when you have money, you can
just buy, just buy, you can just buy these guys.
So they had the rich guys had during that big
meeting to Republican senators John Cornyn and Jim de mint

(42:05):
argue in front of them to basically determine what course
the Republican Party should take. After McCain's big defeat by Obama.
So Cornin basically argued that the two thousand election proved
the Republican Party needed to get more moderate, make a
bigger tint, and accommodate more people so that they could
win elections. Honestly again. Jim de Mint, on the other hand, said,
fuck that noise. We should only go further and further
to the right. Compromises for cowards. Can you guess which

(42:28):
side of the argument Charles Cope backed, Yeah, compromises for cowards.
So the Cooke Brothers became a major force behind the
foundation of the Tea Party movement. One Republican campaign consultant
was quoted in The New Yorker is saying of the
Tea Party, the Koke Brothers gave the money that founded it.
It's like they put the seeds in the ground. Then
the rainstorm comes and the frogs come out of the mud,
and there are candidates. Which that's not how seeds or

(42:51):
frogs work. But he's in politics, not in farming or knowledge. Yeah, knowledge,
general knowledge about biology from the mud, classic mud. Frogs
came out of seeds like frogs do. Two thousand ten
New York Times article broke it down this way, Or

(43:13):
broke down the funding of the Tea Party movement. The
other major sponsor of the Tea Party movement is Dick
Army's Freedom Works, which, like Americans from Prosperity Army, Dick Army,
he's a real guy. Yeah, okay, yeah, no, I mean
we should it's it's fine. It's fine to marinate in
the enjoyment of his name is Dick Army. Yeah, that's good.
Uh yeah. The The other major sponsor of the Tea

(43:34):
Party movement is Dick Army's Freedom Works, which, like Americans
for Prosperities promoting events in Washington this weekend. Under its
original name Citizens for a Sound Economy, Freedom Works received
twelve million twelve million dollars of its funding from Coke
family donations. Using tax records, may Or found that Coke
controlled foundations gave out a hundred and ninety six million
from nineteen to two thou eight, much of it to
conservative causes and institutions. That figure doesn't include the fifty

(43:57):
million in Coke industries lobbying and four point a million
in campaign contributions by its political action committee, putting it
first among energy company peers like EXN Mobile and Chevron.
Since tax law permits anonymous personal donations to nonprofit political groups.
These figures may understate the case. The Coke surely matched
the in kind donations the Tea Party receives in free
promotion seven from Murdocks Fox News, where Beck and Palin

(44:19):
are on the payroll. So Charles Coke and David have
denied any part in the asteroid turfing of the Tea
Party movement, but investigative reporting by Tacky Oldham, director of
AstroTurf Wars, which is a documentary, found very direct evidence
that this was bullshit. Here's a quote from The Guardian.
Oldham infiltrated some of the movement's key organizing events, including

(44:40):
the two thousand nine defending the American Dreams Summit, convened
by a group called Americans for Prosperity. The film shows
David Coke addressing the summit five years ago. He explains,
my brother Charles and I provided the funds to start
Americans for Prosperity. It's beyond my wildest dreams how a
FP has grown into this enormous organization. The convenior tells
the crowd how a FP mobalized opposition to Barack Obama's

(45:01):
healthcare reforms. Quote, we hit the button and we started
doing the twittering and Facebook and the phone calls and
the emails, and you turned up. Then a series of
a FP organizers tell Mr Coke how they have set
up dozens of tea Party events in their home states.
He nods and beams from the podium like a chief
executive receiving rosie reports from his regional sales directors. Afterwards,
the delegates crowd into a FP workshops where they are

(45:22):
told to run how to run further tea Party events.
So the word that these guys went as the tea
Party is totally original movement that started on its own
and whatnot. But the evidence suggests that they funded and
directly planned how it was going to be carried. And
if you remember back in nineteen eighty when David Coke
ran to be vice president of the Libertarian Party, his
running mate had said that that election would be the

(45:44):
cognition of quote a new tea Party. So they're thinking
has been in this long before the election of Barack Obama.
Polity had provided the political impetus to the fuel exactly.
And and also the time hadn't been right in the
eighties because they spent the time the decades since then
pumping money into education, and subliminally it's it's been there,

(46:07):
has it been in the people's back of their minds?
And I think it's more there because of their effort,
Do you know what I mean? I think I think
in my mind I'm trying to say something else that
my mouth is saying. I mean, as the racism was
a major factor. Because I don't disagree with you there either,
but I think that, like I think it was already
in the eighties, but for sure people are like, oh
oh that sounds familiar, you know, like, oh wait a second, yeah, yeah, yeah, okay, anyways, anyways, anyways, anyways,

(46:33):
uh yeah. The timing hadn't been right then, um, for
a variety of reasons, but by two thousand ten, the
timing was right, and that's why the two thousand ten
mid terms did not go well for the Democratic Party,
uh or for Barack Obama. Now, in two thousand and twelve,
the Koch Brothers spent a record breaking four dred and
twelve million dollars on the election, more than what the

(46:54):
top ten unions in the United States had donated combined.
So they are essentially working as a union for rich people.
But there's a lot more money than that than any
trade union. Uh. Clearly, all that money wasn't enough to
stop Barack Obama from winning re election. But over all,
the Coke efforts were wildly successful, as Jane Mayer summarized

(47:15):
in Dark Money, thanks in no small part to huge
quantities of targeted money spent by the Cokes and their
allied donors, the Democratic Party lost both Houses of Congress,
fourteen governorships, and thirty state legislatures, compromising more than nine
hundred seats during Obama's presidency. So their efforts are successful.
This money does not go to nothing. Um. But if
the last twenty years have seen Charles Coke's grand scheme

(47:37):
come close to fruition, it is beginning to look like
he may have reached the limits of what money can buy.
During the two thousand and sixteen election, the Coke brothers,
in their network of political organizations, had collectively a larger
payroll than the Republican Party. The Cokes employed sixteen hundred
staffers in thirty five stags, which gave him three times
the manpower of the Republican Party. UM. The Coke's originally

(47:58):
planned to spend close to a billion dollars in the
two thousand and sixteen election, but the rise of Donald
Trump took them as much by surprise as it took
everyone else. See, the Cokes actually love immigration, illegal or otherwise.
They love free trade and trade deals like NAFTA and
the Pacific Partnership because those things make shiploads of money
for business owners. Donald Trump was exactly the kind of
conservative they did not want to see win election, so

(48:18):
they cut their election spending by hundreds of millions of
dollars and put a huge chunk of what they were
going to still spend into state races instead. The current
CIA director, for example, Michael Pompeo, received more funding than
any other congressional candidate from the Cokes. UH Dark money
suggests that what happened between two thousand and ten and
two thousand and sixteen is that essentially the rabbid anti government,
anti regulation, anti left sentiment that Charles and David Coke

(48:41):
spent hundreds of millions of dollars to inculcate finally grew
beyond them. They helped create the movement that morphed into
trump is Um, but during its evolution they lost control
of it. One former Coke employee said this during the
two thousand and sixteen election quote, we are partly responsible.
We invested a lot in training and arming a grassroots
army that was not controllable. So conflicts have continued between

(49:02):
the Cokes and now President Trump. Most recently, the Coke
network refused to support a Republican and a tight race
in North Dakota because of his Trumps views on trade.
After that news broke, Donald Trump tweeted, quote, the globalist
Koke brothers, who have become a total joke in real
Republican circles, are against strong borders in powerful trade. I
never sought their support because I don't need their money
or bad ideas. They love my tax and regulation cuts,

(49:24):
judicial picks and more. I made them richer. Their network
is highly overrated. I have beaten them at every turn.
They want to protect their companies outside the US from
being taxed. I'm for America first and the American worker,
A puppet for No. One. Two nice guys with bad
ideas make America great again. I half agree with the
President there. The Cokes do have bad ideas. I do

(49:45):
not agree about their being nice guys. Two nice guys
bad ideas. Still these guys. We had nice guys, but
nice guys. I really like what they're doing with the
pipelines filled with holes blowing up neighborhoods. That's nice guy move.
Classic nice guy move. Bad ideas. Uh. In nineteen nine,
when their mother died, Charles Coke basically hid information about

(50:08):
the funeral from his brother's Frederick and Bill. Frederick missed
his mom's funeral, and Bill had to charter a private
plane to get their own time. Not nice guys. Charles
grew up to be just as much of a terrible
parent as his own dad had been. When he saw
his son Chase play what Dark Money describes as a
half hearted tennis match, Charles ordered him sent to work
in a filthy feed lot seven days a week, twelve
hours a day until he got better at tennis. Presumably Meanwhile,

(50:31):
Charles's daughter Elizabeth had this to say about coming home
to see her father during the summer while she was
at college. Quote. As soon as we arrived, I felt
an overwhelming urge to prostrate myself on the floor and
eat dirt in order to illustrate how grateful I am
for everything they've done for me. That I'm not the
spoiled monster they warned me I'd become if I wasn't careful.
She described trying to earn her father's approval as staring

(50:52):
down that dark well of nothing you do will ever
be good enough, You privileged, waste of flesh. This is
how Charles's daughter describes how she feels in her dad's presence.
It's impossible to say right now whether Chase or Elizabeth
will also concoct a decades long conspiracy to influence American
political thought. What I will say is that it seems
like the unique mix of obscene wealth and insane, abusive
pettiness that made Charles Coke the man he is today

(51:14):
will at least have a chance with another generation of
born billionaires. Boy, howdy, isn't inherited wealth grand? Speechless? Yeah?
What else is there to say? I feel my heartbreaks
in a sad way for these kids generations. Huh Yeah, Because,
like Charles Coke didn't have to be the asshole he is,

(51:36):
but there was. The way he was raised made it
very low odds that he was going to turn out
to be this very compassionate guy. For sure, I hope
his kids are compassionate. I hope his kids are better
than him. I hope they've looked at the life their
dad's let him realized. He doesn't. I doubt he's a
happy man because I don't think he's capable of having
close relationships with people. Yeah, he's probably blinded by his ideas. Yeah.

(52:00):
Who can say what's really in another person's heart. Yeah. Yeah,
And maybe maybe I'm just being hopeful that he's miserable
because he's done miserable things. He's just the happiest clam
and the clam factor. No, he's probably a miserable person,
but he's unaware that he's a miserable person. Yeah, because
he doesn't know what it can be to like have
a father who cares about you and and kids that

(52:23):
you feel warmly towards and are proud of those they're
alien to him. Yeah. Yeah, he lost that boxing once,
you know, Yeah he did lose. Yeah, protesters, if you
wind up protesting a coke thing in the future, really
hit dry, really drive home that he's bad at boxing.
That seems to be a sure pot. Wouldn't he'll probably die,

(52:47):
probably put a hit on you. Yeah. I truly enjoyed this.
Thank you, Thank you, Glad you enjoyed this terrible story
of a terrible person. Yeah, I mean it's definitely. I've
definitely been thinking a lot and got sad for a
little while, and I got happy again, and then I
got sad a lot, and then I was just like, wow, yeah,
I'm gonna go get in my carder day. So at

(53:11):
the end of this, are you more or less optimistic? Oh? Less? Oh,
for sure, less, but also a little bit more. It's
nice to hear that his kids are like aware enough
to be like, oh, when I come home, this is
how I feel and this is not how I want
to feel, And maybe they'll change, maybe they can be like, hey,
actually we can make a difference. But yeah, you know,

(53:31):
it probably has it all lined up with the industry
that somebody else just like him is going to take over,
and it's hard to imagine. Yeah, someone good taking over.
It is kind of heartening to me, even though Trump
is the result that they did lose control of this
movement that they built, because it does mean that there
are limits to what wealth can buy. Even though I

(53:52):
don't like what it ran out of control and turned into,
uh foreshadowing of things you come anyway. Yeah, well, well,
well I'll see. I feel like America is on a
good road right now. And you know what I love
to have on those good road trips around Well, well,
I eat the rest of this bag of Doritos like
like some sort of cheese goblets. Please save some for me.

(54:16):
We'll do. Why don't you plug your plug doubles first? Great? Uh?
You can catch me on the internet at ever Maynard
dot com U M A I N A R D
and ever like the word Twitter, Instagram at ever Maynard. Um,
I'm doing shows all around l A, maybe at a
place near you soon, um, who knows. And then I'm

(54:37):
on Netflix in a movie called The Fields. Um watch it,
you know, yeah, watch it again? Watch it. Tweet at
me no haters please, um, sensitive soul um. But also I,
like I said, I love to comment and I do
so aggressively. Yelp read it any any place. Sometimes I'll

(54:58):
just go to Yahoo my man. Yeah, I love answering
things wrong on who Answers. I didn't know I can
do that, But I will be aggressively commenting on who Answers. Yeah.
I really stuff like that, Cora. I really like just
sabotaging it, giving people bad advice on how to treat
first aid injuries and stuff. Okay, that's not okay, Oh,

(55:18):
I'm just you're not kidding. We all try to seed
the world in our own I guess. So let those
mud frogs come up. You plant the seeds, and the
frogs come up. And what did I tell you about
those mud frogs? All right? You can find this mud
frog on Twitter at I right, okay, you can find

(55:38):
this podcast on the internet at behind the Bastards dot com.
We'll have all of the many, many sources for this
episode listed, and you can also find us at at
bastards pot on Twitter and Instagram, where we will be
tweeting and instagramming things. Yeah, so until next week, we'll

(55:59):
be talking about some other terrible person or group of people.
I'm Robert Evans Uh and you know I love about
statistically m m h m hm